Delhi cops shot 250 teargas shells in eight hours

New Delhi, Dec 24: Sunday's lathicharge and brutal response of the policemen at India Gate and Rajpath in New Delhi could be traumatic even for the youngsters used to movie and video violence.

Consider this - 250 teargas shells fired in a span of eight hours on a crowd of around 10,000. This translates into one teargas shell for every 40 persons. It was an indiscriminate use of teargas and revealed the impatience of the law-enforcement personnel. Some images on the web suggest that the police used teargas shells which had outlived their expiry date by over three years. Were the police simply getting rid of expired shells?

Even if one ignores the use of expired shells, one cannot forget the image of the policemen picking up wooden barricades to hit women and the elderly.

How can one trust the police force so short on their patience?

Some of the images doing the rounds on the net are really shocking like that of a police officer trying to throttle a fallen protester on the road.

In another image, a woman is crouched on legs to avoid being hit by a lathi.